[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Mr Quatro

As for Mr Gandhi ... I have yet to meet anyone from India that I like either, but I'll keep looking lol

It's funny that you should say that, because Gandhi and Jesus have a lot of similarities in their behaviour. Both of them came from occupations that were completely unrelated to their future roles, Gandhi was a lawyer, Jesus a carpenter, both dealt with an occupying force, Jesus the Roman Empire, Gandhi the British Empire, and both called for non-violent resistance to the occupation.
If you take a historical look at some of Jesus's sayings, you'll see just how much of a rebel he was, take for example this famous quote:

But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you. —Matthew 5:39-42

I'm going to bring across something I read on a blog a while ago and put it here:

"But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also."

This specifically refers to a hand striking the side of a person’s face, tells quite a different story when placed in it’s proper historical context. In Jesus’s time, striking someone of a lower class ( a servant) with the back of the hand was used to assert authority and dominance. If the persecuted person “turned the other cheek,” the discipliner was faced with a dilemma. The left hand was used for unclean purposes, so a back-hand strike on the opposite cheek would not be performed. Another alternative would be a slap with the open hand as a challenge or to punch the person, but this was seen as a statement of equality. Thus, by turning the other cheek the persecuted was in effect putting an end to the behavior or if the slapping continued the person would lawfully be deemed equal and have to be released as a servant/slave.

I can attest to the original poster’s comments. A few years back I took an intensive seminar on faith-based progressive activism, and we spent an entire unit discussing how many of Jesus’ instructions and stories were performative protests designed to shed light on and ridicule the oppressions of that time period as a way to emphasize the absurdity of the social hierarchy and give people the will and motivation to make changes for a more free and equal society.
For example, the next verse (Matthew 5:40) states “And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.” In that time period, men traditionally wore a shirt and a coat-like garment as their daily wear. To sue someone for their shirt was to put them in their place - suing was generally only performed to take care of outstanding debts, and to be sued for one’s shirt meant that the person was so destitute the only valuable thing they could repay with was their own clothing. However, many cultures at that time (including Hebrew peoples) had prohibitions bordering on taboo against public nudity, so for a sued man to surrender both his shirt and his coat was to turn the system on its head and symbolically state, in a very public forum, that “I have no money with which to repay this person, but they are so insistent on taking advantage of my poverty that I am leaving this hearing buck-ass naked. His greed is the cause of a shameful public spectacle.”

All of a sudden an action of power (suing someone for their shirt) becomes a powerful symbol of subversion and mockery, as the suing patron either accepts the coat (and therefore full responsibility as the cause of the other man’s shameful display) or desperately chases the protester around trying to return his clothes to him, making a fool of himself in front of his peers and the entire gathered community.
Additionally, the next verse (Matthew 5:41; “If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.”) was a big middle finger to the Romans who had taken over Judea and were not seen as legitimate authority by the majority of the population there. Roman law stated that a centurion on the march could require a Jew (and possibly other civilians as well, although I don’t remember explicitly) to carry his pack at any time and for any reason for one mile along the road (and because of the importance of the Roman highway system in maintaining rule over the expansive empire, the roads tended to be very well ordered and marked), however he could not require any service beyond the next mile marker. For a Jewish civilian to carry a centurion’s pack for an entire second mile was a way to subvert the authority of the occupying forces. If the civilian wouldn’t give the pack back at the end of the first mile, the centurion would either have to forcibly take it back or report the civilian to his commanding officer (both of which would result in discipline being taken against the soldier for breaking Roman law) or wait until the civilian volunteered to return the pack, giving the Judean native implicit power over the occupying Roman and completely subverting the power structure of the Empire. Can you imagine how demoralizing that must have been for the highly ordered Roman armies that patrolled the region?
Jesus was a pacifist, but his teachings were in no way passive. There’s a reason he was practically considered a terrorist by the reigning powers, and it wasn’t because he healed the sick and fed the hungry.

You can see, through historical context how different the true meaning of these words were than how they are portrayed in society today. In short, different times meant that things meant different things than they do today (that really wasn't much shorter, was it? ). Which brings me back to the various translations of the bible. When someone says that they follow the bible, do they mean that they follow the original copy which has been lost to time, because that is the only one that will not contain some form of editing or alteration in it. It's like a game of Chinese whispers, eventually degradation will slip in and things will change. Let's not forget either that back before the invention of the printing press, each bible was hand transcribed in latin, meaning that only the priests could understand it and preach it. Who is to say that each preaching priest did not add his own slant to the text, in order to please a certain noble or a reigning monarch?

Do Christians go to church? Do Christians believe that the pope is God representative on earth? Does this not go against the beliefs of Jesus against authority and organised religion? The extravagance of the Vatican, the gold and silver of the church, does this not remind anyone of the gold being counted in the temples? There are so, so many contradictions between organised religion based around Christ and the teachings of Christ that it's little wonder that so many people have moved away from it, it is hypocritical and if there's one thing that people hate, it's hypocrisy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not attacking the words of Christ, nor am I directly attacking your faith, it's good to have faith in something, but it's when these words are twisted into things that they are not, when a whole organisation which contradicts the meaning of Jesus's words is built up around them, that makes me sad, and I think that if Jesus did come back and saw what we have done with what he said, he would be sad too.